birthday girl
by Anna Queen
Summary: ...'We're falling through space – you and me – clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go... ' – Rose persuades the Doctor to take her on a very special birthday outing, but will she get more than she bargained for?


Rose is twenty today – no longer a teenager, which she hadn't thought about until half-way through breakfast. She thinks she should feel old but she doesn't. She feels reckless, maybe because this morning he gave her a bracelet, and it's the kind of bracelet you give a girl when you've never bought a girl a bracelet before. At the back of her head a little voice whispers that nine hundred years is a long time to wait to give a girl a bracelet. So she sits swinging her legs from her perch on the edge of the console, in spite of what he's said before about disrupting the centrifugal something-or-other.

"Where are you taking me then, Doctor?" she says, leaning over, because she likes watching him pretend to fix things.

He prods at a wire that's come loose – or at least, now it has. "I'm taking you somewhere, am I?"

She nods as she reaches across to take the sonic screwdriver. "M'hm. You're taking me to…I know, right – your best memory. Ever. Take me there – where it happened, I mean."

"Here – that way." It's not like him, but he seems hesitant. "That's a lot of memories to choose from."

"Exactly. That's my guarantee that it's going to be good."

He thinks about it a moment, and then he jumps to his feet.

"All right, Rose Tyler," he says, and the TARDIS hums beneath his fingers.

_Maybe it's Earth. Maybe that's where we're going_, says that irrepressible voice at the back of her head even though she knows it's silly. Why should meeting her be his best memory? Just because meeting him is the start of all of hers.

When the TARDIS shudders to a standstill it's too soon, and even though she's smiling at him because he knows she likes surprises, she doesn't want it to be a surprise; she wants it to be somewhere she's been already. Somewhere he remembers for her.

She tells herself _Time War_ and _nine hundred years _and _silly little girl_ because with all of time and space at his fingertips there is no way on earth or any other planet for that matter his best memory can have anything to do with her. So now she's the one hesitating, reaching out for anything that might give her some kind of clue.

"What I'm wearing, it's OK is it?"

"It's fine."

Her heart thuds in her throat, and with a deep breath she pulls open the door and steps outside.

It's not Earth. It's purple: deep, cavernous purple, mist fronded and strangely cool, given there are two suns in the sky above them. A sound like rain on tarmac echoes faintly around them, which is silly, because there's neither rain nor tarmac here.

In the distance something that might be clouds, and might be mountains, and might be Angel Delight rises and folds in white-gold peaks so light they might be freshly whipped.

She looks at the bracelet jangling on her wrist and bites her lip, because at least this year she didn't get any stupid roses.

"Where are we?"

He grins as he answers, and she pouts back, because this one's more of a mouthful than raxacori…raxa…raxathingumytorius, and she wouldn't put it past him to have brought her here for no other reason than that. When she walks a few steps away from him she can feel the ground throb beneath her feet, the way her bedroom floor does in the TARDIS. She remembers what he said to her when they first met, about feeling the earth move. Maybe it's not so strange that since meeting him she sometimes wonders if that's what she can feel, too.

_We're falling through space – you and me – clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go –_

"So what happened here, then?"

"It hasn't happened yet."

She smiles a little, because no-one else gets to time travel on their birthday.

"When does it happen?"

He takes her hand, spinning her to face him as he reaches out for the other though it's already given, and this close a grin says more than any words she remembers, and even with her heart tripping so hard she still hears his answer.

"Now."


End file.
